in principle it's a good idea but understand the possibility of cheating being an irritating by-product, maybe they could create a 20-second pause button, which would allow a brief pause but not enough to cheat in?

I would think that if a game were to be paused, the page and clues wouldn't be visible except for a "resume game" button so you can't see any of it when the game is paused. I know it's technically possible that someone could write it all down, pause, and solve it on paper, but that seems like quite a lot of unnecessary effort if you can't see it on the page. Hopefully, that would make the assets of a pause button stronger than the possibility that someone would use it to cheat.

Yeah, I think a pause button could really help. My time is usually ridiculously high due to having to do something quickly and realize that a whole minute has gone by. But with modern technology people could take a picture of the screen or something and solve the puzzle in 20 seconds, according to the computer. So I get why they don't make a pause button. But still, It could really be helpful to the ones who need it.

While I would figuratively kill for a pause button, there would be nothing to keep people from abusing it. It drives me crazy to be a couple clues away from completing a puzzle and then get interrupted only to come back 30 minutes later to finish. It would be nice to make it onto the score board once in a while, but then I suppose those who are already in the top ten would would be that much harder to catch up to as some would likely abuse it for their own sense of self worth rather than use it in the true sense of competition. But that's just the bitter old man in me speaking.

As an aside, has anyone found that their scores are much lower ( not being able to pause aside ) since the change in the game? Time was that I could routinely complete a 5X4 puzzle within 100 second of the fasted time. Now I am lucky to do one in less that a thousand seconds. Are the clues a little more obscure, or am I going brain dead?

I traded some e-mails with Stephen Ryder during the Beta phase of the 2.0 upgrade and noted that the previous versions of the 4x4 puzzles were often finished in one pass or less through the clues (some clues not needed, or redundant), but that no longer seemed to be the case. I would quote his reply, but apparently my e-mail site has gone down, but essentially the response was that all the new puzzles have been designed to avoid those overly simple cases, to eliminate most redundant clues, and require the clues to depend on building on others, so that one pass through won't result in the puzzle being done (unless you have a memory where you can recall previous read clues without having to reread them and build on them as you go).